"The Lost Symbol" Dan Brown’s highly anticipated follow-up to "The Da Vinci Code." broke sales records on its first day and in its first week of release last month, selling nearly two million copies in the United States, Canada and Britain, according to the publisher. But according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales in the United States, the number of copies the book sold last week fell by 47 percent, to 214,000 from 401,000.
"True Compass" Senator Edward M. Kennedy's memoir, sold 39,000 copies last week, down 43 percent from the previous week’s tally of 69,000. And over all, according to BookScan, book sales were down about 4 percent compared with the same week last year, suggesting that neither of those titles or any of the other big fall books from heavyweights like Mitch Albom, Pat Comroy, E. L. Doctorow and Audrey Niffenegger were helping booksellers to overcome the sludgy economy.
“They are all great books, but they are all hardcover books,” said Ellen Archer, publisher of Hyperion, a unit of Disney that just released Mr. Albom’s “Have a Little Faith.” “How many hardcover purchases can one person make given these difficult times? Are they going to choose one of their nonfiction reads and one great novel and stop and wait for the paperbacks? Probably.” Both Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which released “The Lost Symbol,” and Twelve, the imprint of Grand Central Publishing Group that put out “True Compass,” said they were happy with the results so far and expected strong holiday sales.
“We are thrilled with the performance of the book,” Suzanne Herz, a spokeswoman for Knopf Doubleday, said in an e-mail message. “With such pent-up demand for a new novel by Dan Brown, it was not unexpected to see a decline in sales after the first week. It is the nature of the blockbuster book.”
Booksellers said other thrillers by name-brand authors had a similar trajectory. “ ‘The Da Vinci Code’ built by word of mouth, and this one came out of the gates really strong,” said Kathryn Popoff, vice president of the trade division at Borders Group, referring to “The Lost Symbol.” “For us it’s falling off as we projected.”
Gerry Donaghy, new book purchasing supervisor at Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., said he and his co-workers wondered, “How many of the fall books are people holding off buying themselves and hoping to get them as gifts?” He added, “Maybe that’s just optimism.” Laurence J. Kirshbaum, a literary agent and former publishing executive, said the rule of thumb in the industry was to take sales figures from September and October and multiply them by three or four for holiday shopping in November and December.
“A lot of people buy books because they don’t know Uncle Harry’s shirt size, so at the last minute it’s either books or candy,” he said. “There’s no question that the business is in a lull right now, but I do think it’s a little early because the real Christmas business is still a month, maybe six weeks away.” But other publishing insiders suggested that because Knopf Doubleday had printed five million copies of “The Lost Symbol” and gone back to press for 600,000 more after the first day of sales, book sales would have to reverse dramatically for the title to meet the expectations of the publishing house. And with sales of “True Compass” dwindling, some within the industry wondered how Twelve would recoup the advance of more than $8 million it paid for the memoir.
Cary Goldstein, a spokesman for Twelve, said that sales of “True Compass” were meeting the publisher’s calculations and that it would cover some of the advance with sales of the rights to publish the book in Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Korea, China and other countries.
“The book has exceeded sales targets at all of our major accounts,” Mr. Goldstein added. “We expect to net at least one million copies.” Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, a chain of independent stores in South Florida and the Cayman Islands, said Senator Kennedy’s memoir was likely to appeal to gift-buying customers. But he said the biggest successes were often books from unknown authors that built slowly by word of mouth.
He pointed to “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, which has stormed through book clubs and has sold 421,000 copies in hardcover and 583,000 in paperback. Mr. Kaplan, together with the producer Paula Mazur, has optioned the movie rights.
Other big titles showed mixed results. "Her fearful symmetry" the second novel by Ms. Niffenegger, author of the best-selling “Time Traveler’s Wife,” sold just 23,000 copies in its first week, according to BookScan. Publishing insiders suggested that was a disappointment given that Scribner, the unit of Simon & Schuster that published the book, paid Ms. Niffenegger close to $5 million for it.
“We all expect miracles, and some miracles take a little while,” said Susan Moldow, publisher of Scribner.
By Motoko Rich for the New York Times. Published: October 7, 2009 A version of this article appeared in print on October 8, 2009, on page C1 of the New York edition.
